Cup holders have been a huge issue in the company. This has been a 20-year debate within the company. This is really about taking into account customer needs, and obviously at a certain point in time the engineers did not believe that this was an issue.

But while BMW is working to fix this folly in design, Willisch is overwhelmingly bullish on the state of the company. He says that BMW has lead luxury sales in the US for the first time in 11 years and is hoping this will translate into big year end gains.

He is also trying to quash the sentiment that BMW cannot build a front-wheel-drive car without tarnishing the name, saying:

We went through that [question] with "Would BMW ever build a wagon, or ever build an SUV, or a diesel?" and we do all that now...The powertrain to the back [in rear-wheel drive] always takes up a lot of space...You won't see a front-wheel-drive 3 Series.

Even with this assertion, the range of front-drive BMWs will need to be driven before we can decide this is not blasphemous.